Hyderabad, September 27: Unuttered but palpable.
At the memorial meeting to YSR at Nalla Kaluva in Kurnool district today, not a single word by Jagan Mohan Reddy suggested a claim to his father’s chief ministerial mantle.
But Reddy fils’ brief address, ostensibly restricted to recalling the good work done by the departed leader, such as Jalayagnam and Arogya Sree, was replete with political undertones and suggested that he is tired of the waiting game. On arrival, ironically by helicopter, at Nalla Kaluva, Jagan Mohan Reddy walked to the chopper crash site where he paid homage to his father. Back later at Nalla Kaluva, he addressed a huge public meeting, trying to imitate his father’s diction and mannerisms.
And though the demands for his elevation were relatively restrained, the scale of the turnout, indicating that huge effort had gone into crowd mobilisation, did point quite unmistakably to defiance of sorts.
Some religious heads were upfront in saying that he should be made chief minister — and even went to the extent of dubbing those hindering him from occupying the top post in the state as Satans — but neither those who mattered in politics nor Jagan Mohan Reddy himself directly raised the issue. Ever since Jagan’s loyalists began raising the demand that he be allowed to step into his father’s shoes, party president Sonia Gandhi has been maintaining silence, the eloquence of which conveys the impression that she does not consider him equipped for the role yet.
But the Reddy camp seems impervious to the message and it looks set to continue building pressure, though not as brazenly as they did immediately after the death of the chief minister, which the party high command had viewed as intimidatory.
Meanwhile, the ministers in K Rosaiah’s cabinet stayed away from the memorial meeting barring Shilpa Mohan Reddy (Housing) who took prior permission from the chief minister to make arrangements.
The decision to keep away was apparently for fear that their presence at the meeting would have been construed as defiance of not only Rosaiah but the Congress High Command itself.
In the wake of reports that the Congress leadership had taken a serious view of several ministers holding parleys with MP KVP Ramachandra Rao a short while ahead of the Cabinet meeting yesterday as to the issues to be raised, the ministers seem to have decided to either support Rosaiah or at least put on a pretence of distancing themselves from Jagan Mohan Reddy.
–Agencies–